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University of Virginia education professor emeritus E.D. Hirsch Jr. suggests in this blog post that common core standards offer a much-needed shift in strategies to help improve the way literacy is taught in U.S. schools. Hirsch, who is founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation, writes that classroom time devoted to literacy should include nonliterary subjects such as history and science, which will help close a "knowledge gap" while it helps students improve their reading skills.

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An assistant professor says Internet-based teaching tools helped him personalize instruction for students in a packed psychology class, improve achievement and reduce administrative tasks. Igor Dolgov of New Mexico State University said he selected McGraw-Hill Education's Connect Psychology because it integrated the textbook into the Web-based instruction.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates both support "inspection", but a teacher-accountability system that is widely used in Japan under the name "lesson study" may be a better way to improve teaching, writes James W. Stigler, a UCLA professor and senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Under the system, groups of teachers create, enact and test teaching methods. The success and failure of those methods can be shared with their peers.

More schools are giving computers to their students, but such "one-to-one computing" programs are raising questions about whether the computers are actually helping children learn and, if so, at what price, writes a New York University professor. Jonathan Zimmerman, who has a teenage daughter with a school-issued laptop, writes that reports on whether laptops are beneficial to students' education are conflicting and a comprehensive 2004 study in Texas found no difference in test scores between 21 middle schools that issued computers and 21 that didn't.

A single-minded focus on skills without teaching knowledge is a strategy that has never worked, writes Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University and co-chairwoman of Common Core. Ravitch argues that schools can't teach 21st-century skills without teaching knowledge. "Until we teach both teachers and students to value knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well," she writes.

U.S. education researchers have found more effective ways of teaching science and math, but critics are preventing those techniques from being implemented in U.S. classrooms, says author and British math education professor Jo Boaler. Problem-based methods engage students more actively in learning, but are targeted by the "anti-knowledge movement" that "undermines our ability to improve American children's mathematical understanding," she writes.